Hello, gorgeous. That’s what we said when
we first laid eyes on Nvidia's reference design for the GeForce GTX 690, which
combines two full 28nm GK104 GPUs into one PCB and covers them with the
best-looking cooling shroud we’ve seen on any video card. Our in-depth analysis
of the reference card can be found in our August 2012 issue, but we can’t
verdictizea reference card. If you’re wondering how this Asus GTX 690 differs
from the reference card Nvidia sent us, wonder no more: It’s exactly the same,
except the edges of the PCB are a slightly different color.

Still
gorgeous. Still massive.

Specifications

Asus GTX 690

Nvidia GTX i 690 Reference

Nvidia GTX 680 SLI

AMD Radeon HD j ; 7970 CrossFireX ;

EVGA GTX 680

3DMark 11 Perf

P15.056

P15.104

P15,804

P13.817

P9.555

3DMark 11 Extreme

X5832

X5800

X6072

X5352

X3249

3DMark Vantage Perf

P44.501

P44.501

P45.205

P44.180

P34.339

Unigine Heaven 2.5 (fps)

59.8

59.8

60.8

57.6

31

Shogun 2 (fps)

35.4

37.9

38

75

18.7

Far cry 2/ long (fps)

183.7

184.7

187.9

186.3

107.3

Dirt 3 (fps)

123

122.9

124.5

114.5

73

HAWX 2 (fps)

WNR

224

225

229

131

Metro 2033 (fps)

29

29.6

29.5

29

16.3

STALKER: CoPDX11 (fps)

1 64.2

64.6

66.1

76.7

34.3

Just cause 2 (fps)

80

79.31

81.03

91.85

54.7

Batman: Arkham City (fps)

103

102

104

86

58

Base Clock (Actual)

915MHz

915MHz

1,006MHz

1,000MHz

1.006MHz

Boost Clock

1,019MHz

985MHz

1,056MHz

N/A

1,056MHz

Memory Clock

1,502MHz

1,502MHz

1,502MHz

1,425MHz

1,502MHz

Best scores botded. Our GPU test bed
consists of a stock-clocked Intel Core 7-3960X on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe board
with 16GB DDR3/1600. a 256GB Samsung 830 Series boot SSD, and a 1.050W
Tnermaltake Toughpower Grand PSU. in a Cosmos II chassis. All tests performed
at 2560x1600 with all sellings maxed and 4x MSAA except where noted. Power
use measured with a Watts Up Pro.

Like the reference card, the Asus GTX 690
has a whopping 3,072 CUDA cores, 256 texture units, 64 ROPs, and 4GB of memory
at 6,008MHz combined speed. Unlike previous dual-GPU cards, it has all the
cores and texture units intact on each GPU, and each GPU is only slightly under
clocked, to 915MHz with a 1,019MHz boost clock. The GTX 680 has a base clock of
1,006MHz and a boost clock of 1,058MHz.

Since this is essentially a duplicate of
the reference design, it carries the same 48-lane PLX bridge chip connecting
the GPUs to each other and to the x16 PCIe 3.0 interface. It also uses the
reference cooling shroud, for which we can’t fault Asus one bit. Why mess with
a great thing?

The cooling shroud is chromium-plated cast
aluminum with magnesium-alloy fan housing in the center of the card. The fan
takes in air centrally and blows it into vapor chambers atop each GPU, venting
the hot air toward both the front and back of the card—not ideal for standard
front-to-back airflow. The vapor chambers over the GPUs are covered with
polycarbonate windows. The fan is fairly quiet even when running at full load.
It’s not silent, but it’s less noise than a pair of cards would be.

The Asus GTX 690 has a TDP of just 300W (a
single GTX 680 has a TDP of 195W) and requires two 8-pin PCIe power connectors.
Its rear panel contains two dual-links DVI-I ports, one dual-link DVI-D, and a
Mini DisplayPort 1.2 connector. The card, like the reference board, is 11
inches long.

Asus ships the GTX 690 with its GPU Tweak
software, which allows for easy overclocking of the memory clock and GPU boost
clock, as well as voltage tweaks. We were able to overclock the boost clock to
around 1,100MHz without sacrificing stability, but the card got flaky as we
went higher. More tweaking would doubtless have given us a long-term stable
overclock.

In our benchmarks, the performance of the
Asus GTX 690 was indistinguishable from the reference card—that is, it was
within a few percentage points of a set of stock-clocked GTX 680s in SLI, while
consuming less power. Depending on the benchmark, it’s anywhere from 46 percent
to 95 percent faster than a single stock-clocked GTX 680. On all but three benchmarks,
it beat a pair of reference Radeon HD 7970s—we’ll test it again against GHz
edition 7970s when we track down a pair of them.

Very few people need the power of two
top-of-the-Une GPUs. But if you do, it’s better to have them on one video card
rather than two: It’ll draw less power, be easier to cool, and will give you
the option of adding another GTX 690 down the line. We’re still wild about the
looks of the cooling shroud, if not about the fact that it exhausts hot air in
both directions. So far the only GTX 690s we've seen on the market have been
stock-clocked ones using the reference shroud, and AMD’s dual-Radeon card is
nowhere to be found, so a GTX 690 is your only dual-GPU option right now.
Asus’s is slightly more expensive than, say, EVGAs, and it’s not clear what you
get for the extra $50. But at that point, you’re already spending a grand, so
does the extra $50 really matter?